by William Gay
The picking and strumming pattern he uses in songs like Mr. McTell’s Got the Blues shows up in Jimmie Rodger’s numbered blue yodels, and occasionally some of the words: She’s tailor made, she ain’t no handme-down. Eric Clapton uses the guitar lick and some of the words from Stole Rider Blues in his own Motherless Child. Taj Mahal and the Allman Brothers put their own spin on Statesboro Blues.
“Any good gal’s got a mojo but she’s tryin’ to keep it hid,” he sings on “Scarey Day Blues”, and over the years McTell had become adept at hiding his own mojo, swapping one mask for another, sliding adroitly from role to role as if simply changing clothes.
When word circulated that a new recording scout was in Atlanta, McTell immediately turned up with his guitar and a new persona, ready to make a record. He was Red Hot Willie Glaze for Bluebird, He was Blind Sammie for Columbia, and Georgia Bill for Okeh. He was also Blind Willie for Vocalion, Barrelhouse Sammy, and naming himself after a barbecue joint where the tips had been good, he was Pig n’ Whistle Red when he cut some sides for Regal.
When McTell was in his fifties he abruptly quit singing anything but spirituals. No more playful ribaldry like Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo, no more mojos Mama wouldn’t let him see. In 1957 he began preaching in the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Atlanta. Maybe he heard the sand running in the glass. His widow said in an interview in 1977 that he was tired, that he said he wanted to get back to God.
His last recording session took place a year before he laid it all aside to follow religion. A man named Ed Rhodes, who ran a record store in Atlanta, heard that there was a blind guitar player singing for tips behind a bar called The Blue Lantern Club, a musician playing the twelve-string guitar and sounding just like Huddie Ledbetter.
Rhodes went to see for himself. It was McTell, and Rhodes, who owned some recording equipment, tried to persuade McTell to record for him. Considering that he had recorded for decades under a dozen different names, McTell was strangely hesitant, but ultimately he was talked into it. Over a period of several weeks, McTell loosened up and reprised an entire career’s worth of music. The songs were interspersed with accounts of his years on the road, an oral autobiography of his life and times.
Intentions here were good; the follow-through left much to be desired. The tapes languished for years in an attic, ultimately winding up in a garbage can. When they were discovered, only one salvageable reel of tape remained. (It was released on Prestige/Bluesville as Blind Willie McTell’s Last Session.)
He’d long suffered from diabetes, and complications from the disease brought on a stroke. He died in 1959 in the state hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia. When he was buried outside Thomson, his tombstone read: WILLIAM McTEAR.
So he never lived to see the 60’s, when the old blues giants were sought out and lionized, when necktied Yankees showed up on Mississippi John Hurt’s front porch and waited for him to come in from the field. He never worked the college circuit like Son House and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. When he died, the great folk revival was still embryonic, the Kingston Trio in matching blazers were singing antiseptic versions of Appalachian ballads. Yet to be were Dylan, Elizabeth Cotton’s strung-upside-down guitar playing Freight Train on national television, Robert Johnson bubbling under Billboard’s Hot 100.
Blind Willie McTell was in the ground but his music wasn’t. Plunder his music and you’ll find the bones of other music not fleshed out.
Dylan, in particular, has been instrumental in keeping McTell’s music alive. He recorded respectful, loving versions of Delia and Broke Down Engine. Perhaps part of Dylan’s McTell attraction was the shifting personas, the Blind Sammies and Pig ‘n’ Whistle Reds. Dylan once recorded under the name of Blind Boy Grunt, and his own closets must be stuffed with masks he’s cast off and disguises he’s sent out to be altered again and again.
In 1983 Dylan wrote the ultimate eulogy, Blind Willie McTell, one of the most haunting songs, an impressionistic distillate of East Texas martyrs, Southern plantations burning,, the ghosts of slavery ships.
Between the lines you can imagine Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie Johnson working that Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, Savannah circuit, traveling the dirt roads in the darkness they are heir to, a quarter moon unseen over the trees, their guitar cases carried like credit cards that will get them a meal, a pallet on the floor, a woman’s smile they can feel rather than see, a poet’s voice forty years down the line that will sing: No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.
SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD
THE WEEK BEFORE MERLEFEST I went by to check on Grady, and he was putting a fuel pump on his RV. It was a huge RV so ancient it looked like something the Joads might have fled the Dust Bowl in, and something was always going wrong with it. Grady had skinned knuckles and a half-drunk beer and a home-rolled Prince Albert cigarette stuck to his lower lip that waggled when he talked.
He was not in the best of moods.
I don’t think I’m going to this one, he said. It’s got to where all this traveling around costs too much money. I believe I’ve about seen everything anyway.
I looked at the RV. It was emblazoned with hand-pained legends memorializing bluegrass festivals past. The Bean Blossom Festival, the Foggy Mountain Festival, MerleFest ‘96, ‘97, ‘98. Maybe he had seen everything. He told me about Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, cracking a bullwhip and preening as the newly crowned King of Folk. Another time at Newport, his RV had been parked next to the one belonging to Mother Maybelle Carter. They had sat in lawn chairs and watched twilight come on, and she had shown him how to play the autoharp, placing his fingers just so to form the chords.
Grady told me a lot of things, but he had the goods to back it all up. The walls of the house he rented were papered with surrealistic collage of photographs of the high and the mighty, the late and the great: Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Don Reno and Red Smiley. Grady was in a lot of the pictures. Bill Monroe was embracing him like a long-lost brother in one, and there were pictures of Grady’s own band, the Greenbriar Boys, skinny guys in Hank Williams suits standing before old-timey WSM microphones as if they were frozen back in the back and white ‘40s.
If you go, go up and talk to Doc Watson, Grady said.
I may. I always wanted to know where he got that arrangement for Sitting on Top of the World.
He got it off that old record by the Mississippi Sheiks.
I heard that record. That’s not the arrangement.
Well, hell. Just go up and ask him. Walk right up to him, he’ll tell you. He’s not stuck up like a lot of them are. He’s a hell of a nice guy.
Well, he’s blind. Maybe that makes him a little more approachable.
Grady didn’t want to hear it. A blind man can be a prick the same as anybody else, he said. He’s just a hell of a nice guy.
Early in the morning of October 23, 1985, Arthel Doc Watson received the worst news a father can get: His son was dead. Eddy Merle Watson had been plowing on a steep hillside when the tractor he was driving overturned and rolled on him.
It was a blow that Doc almost did not recover from. It was a blow that resonated on a number of levels: Aside from the incalculable loss of a child, Doc had lost a friend and a fellow musician. For a time it seemed he might even lose the music as well, because Merle and Doc and the music were inextricably bound together.
In 1964, when he was fourteen, Merle had learned to play guitar while his father was away. He had learned to play it so well that when Doc went back on the road, Merle went with him. That fall they played Berkeley Folk Festival, and he was all over the place on Doc’s next album, Southbound. They toured and recorded together for the next twenty-one years, right up to that morning in 1985.
Merle became a proficient blues guitarist, and some of the albums subtly reflect his love for the genre. But he could pick flattop guitar with the best of them, and he could frail the banjo in the style of country performers like Uncle Dave Macon. When he died he was a few
days away from winning Frets magazine’s Bluegrass Picker of the Year award.
In what may be one of the few purely altruistic gestures in the music business, a handful of folks decided to do something. A friend of Doc’s, Bill Young, together with Townes and Ala Sue Wyke, approached Doc with a proposition. Townes is Dean of Resource Development at Wilkes Community College, in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and the three of them convinced Doc to play a benefit concert on the campus. The funds raised would be used to create a memorial garden in Merle’s honor.
Doc agreed, and a few of Merle’s friends, including the banjoist Tim O’Brien, volunteered their time and ended up playing from the beds of two flatbed trucks.
That was the first MerleFest, in 1988. By contrast, the festival in 1999, while still held on the college campus, was a vast sprawl of tents and stages and concessions accommodating more than a hundred performers and over sixty-two thousand people in the audience.
There was not a flatbed truck in sight.
The first night of the festival was cold and rainy, but the performances went on inside tents, where hundreds of folding chairs were arranged in rows. When you came out of the tents, the wind would be blowing and the rain would sting your face, but nobody seemed to mind. Earlier there had been a little grumbling when the performer list had been released: Hootie and the Blowfish? Steve Earle? These were not the direct descendants of Bill Monroe. Earle had been touring with the bluegrass great Del McCoury, but there was a loose-cannon quality about him, and he was a lot more edgy and confrontational than, say, Ralph Stanley.
But never mind. This audience could take it in stride. They had come to have a good time, and by God they were going to have a good time.
There is some kind of common bond between participant and observer; common heritage maybe, the unspoken reverence for certain values: Family, home, and the tattered remains of the American Dream. Disparate elements of the audience mingled as easily as Freemasons meeting far from home and exchanging the password. Except here no password was needed. The fact that you were here seemed password enough.
The second day was sunny and as perfect as days in April get, and the shuttles were busy early ferrying folks down to the main gate. The parking lot is a mile or so from the festival, and buses carry festival-goers down a winding road to the entrance. Watching this potential audience disembark you are struck by the fact that there seems to be no type, no average, and that every spectrum of America is represented: middle-aged hippies and their new SUV driving yuppie offspring; farmers and farmers’ wives; factory workers; the well-off in expensive outdoor gear from L.L. Bean; and longhaired young men in beards and fool’s motley who seemed determined to be ready should the ‘60s clock around again.
And just as you are about to decide that there is no common element among the spectators, you notice the percentage of people carrying instruments. Guitars and banjos in hardshells. Cased fiddles tucked under the arm and God knows how many harmonicas pocketed like concealed weapons.
You don’t see this at a rock concert or at the Grand Ole Opry, folks coming equipped to make their own music should the need arise. But bluegrass is widely perceived as handmade music, as opposed to, say, the output of song factories on Nashville’s Music Row. The people who love bluegrass love it enough to learn to play it, and they are intensely loyal to the music, to the performers, and to one another. That love of music is the common factor, the source of the brotherhood that seems to radiate off the audience like good vibrations.
Music is always in the air here. Wandering past tents and the open-air stages, you hear it segue from bluegrass to old-time rustic to a tent where a Cajun saws his fiddle at breakneck speed, and young girls jerk and sway with their partners on sawdust-strewn floors. There are vendors everywhere. MerleFest is a growth industry. Attendance has grown every year that the festival has been in existence, but not as fast as the number of vendors and service providers: You can buy the usual tapes and CDs of your favorites, t-shirts and sweatshirts and blankets and plaster busts of musicians and folk art and homemade jewelry; Italian food and Mexican food and down-home American food; anything you want to drink, unless you want it to contain alcohol, alcohol is forbidden on the festival grounds.
During the course of the four-day festival, you learn that a lot of these people know one another. They know one another well enough to remember the names of their respective children and what everybody does for a living. They will meet again before the year is out, whether they live in Alabama or Pennsylvania. They begin in the spring, at MerleFest, and through the careful allocation of vacation days or the advent of three-day weekends, their paths will cross at bluegrass festivals in the South, or in Midwestern states like Michigan or Indiana, where bluegrass is almost a religion. They will see the shows and late in the day will get together and grill out and catch up on old times. Likely they will drink a beer or two and make a little music themselves.
Like family. In a sense they are a family, loose and nomadic but keeping in touch, and at the very bottom of this family is what they believe bluegrass music is all about.
Family and Doc Watson
Doc Watson, blinded by an eye infection during infancy, first learned to play the harmonica. From there he went to a banjo with a drum made from the skin of a house cat. But when he’d listen to records, the guitar was what he liked, and he began fooling around with one his brother had borrowed. His father heard Doc and told him that if he could learn a song by the end of the day, then he would buy Doc one of his own. When his father came in from work that night, Doc played When Roses Bloom in Dixieland, and the next day Doc owned his first guitar.
Watson was playing on the radio at age nineteen, and in the years between learning that first song and becoming an icon, he played roadhouses and church socials and square dances. He played all kinds of music, country, rockabilly, swing, Appalachian ballads about young women wronged by their lovers.
It is amazing to listen to the Folkways records Doc made with Clarence Tom Ashley in the early days of the ’60s. His style seems fully formed: the complex picking, the impeccable interaction between bass and treble strings, the breathless, death-defying runs he interjects into spaces of time so small there seems scarcely room to accommodate them. You keep listening for him to miss a note, deaden a string, but he does not. There have been countless long and drunken arguments over how many guitars, one or two, were playing on a particular track. It was one guitar, Doc’s guitar.
In every great performer’s life there are watershed concerts, events that forever alter the rest of the career from what has gone before. For Doc one of these came in 1963, when he was brought to the Newport Folk Festival by the folklorist Ralph Rinzler. Doc was forty-one years old. He sang about blackberry blossoms, shady groves, houses of the rising sun, and the sad fatalism of sitting on top of the world. When he began, he was an unknown guitarist with a pleasant baritone, on a long and winding road from Deep Gap, North Carolina. When he was helped from the chair and led from the stage, he was on his way to a contract with Vanguard Records, and he had reinvented forever the way folk musicians approached the guitar.
As has been said, there are more than a hundred performers here, and there are no slouches. These are the heavy hitters and brand-name pickers of bluegrass, everyone from hardshell traditionalists to the avant-garde, folks who through virtuoso playing and infusions from jazz are moving bluegrass into new and uncharted territory.
But no one questions what this thing is all about.
The Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark usually performs his song Dublin Blues during his sets, a song that has the quatrain:
I have seen the David
I’ve seen the Mona Lisa too
I have heard Doc Watson
Play Columbus Stockade Blues
At the mention of Watson’s name there is an outbreak of applause, thunderous and spontaneous. It happens the same way before different audiences each time Clark performs the song.
When Doc is led up the
wooden steps to the stage, he approaches from the rear, and the first thing you see is his silver hair. At the first sight of it, the audience erupts. Doc is guided across the stage to where folding chairs have been positioned before the microphones. He is assisted into a chair, and he feels for the guitar in the open case beside his seat. He takes the guitar and sits cradling it, his face turned toward the crowd he can feel but not see, waiting until the applause dies down.
A stocky young man with a black beard has seated himself in the chair beside Doc’s. He has taken up a guitar as well. He touches Watson’s arm, and Watson leans toward the microphone.
This is my grandson Richard, he says, and he’s going to help me out a little here. This is Merle’s boy.
The crowd erupts again. The torch has been passed.
Doc’s guitar kicks off a set of country blues, old Jimmie Rodgers songs, and the song Clark referenced. The third generation holds his own with ease, as if perhaps guitar playing was simply a matter of genetics.
Between songs Doc jokes easily with the audience, tells a couple of stories. The audience eats it up. They’re eager to laugh at his stories, and maybe they’ve heard them before; their laughter anticipates the punch lines. They love him. He could sell them a used car with a blown transmission, a refrigerator that keeps things warm instead of cold. His voice is comforting and reassuring. He could be a neighbor sitting on the edge of your porch, or rocking right slow in the willow rocker.
Except for the playing. The picking is impeccable; it’s what you expect Doc to do: the hands sure and quick, the notes clean and distinct, and the absolute right note to go where he picks it. Those cannot be seventy-six-year-old hands, the audience is thinking.
